The Man Who Never Was

When Timmy takes Linda on their first date, it's to see a movie about a corpse. Specifically, about a corpse that was assigned a completely fabricated identity: "they dress him up in an officer's uniform, plant fake documents in his pockets, then dump him in the sea and let the currents wash him onto a Nazi beach" (O'Brien 220). The central emotion O'Brien associates with this movie is fear. Even with his eyes closed, he couldn't escape the splash of the body, and continued to see "how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead" (O'Brien 220). Throughout the novel, O'Brien always comes back to the idea that deadness is absolute. There aren't degrees or shades of death, and once someone is killed, it can't be undone. In many ways, I think it is the fear of this crushing realization that drives (both author and writer) O'Brien to tell stories. The author reanimates corpses through tales of their lives, saving them out of sheer necessity...but he does this for people who never existed in the first place. He is, in essence, recreating the movie that Timmy saw with Linda. Because writer O'Brien fears the splash of bodies and the disappearance of his friends, he fights to preserve them. Author O'Brien, on the other hand, uses The Man Who Never Was as a way to call attention to his storytelling. The characters are made up. They don't exist. They "never were." But he can preserve them regardless, because through his writing, he creates them, just as those men in the movie created a British soldier when they dumped a corpse into the sea. It is in this way that he fights off death.